Brisson, Barnabé, 1531-1591.
Brisson's De Verborum : Roman/Canon Law
| |
| De Verborum, 1743 | |
| |
| De Verborum, 1743 | |
Barnabé Brisson was a renowned jurist and philologist who had an illustrious career and wrote prolifically. He was widely respected and was appointed president of the Parliament of Paris in 1588. In 1591, though, he was hanged by the Seize (the Sixteen), a group of insurgents who captured Paris in a bizarre coup. The Seize was a political group that had pretensions of ruling the country; they advocated for the lower classes and the restoration of the general council of the League, had some power within the League and the government in Paris and had even been instrumental in having Brisson appointed to his parlement post in the first place, three years earlier. Over time, though, they felt their demands were being generally ignored by various sectors of the government. Extremists in their ranks gradually stepped up the intensity of their actions, and in November 1591 they seized Brisson and two other conseillers and publicly hanged all three of them. Many of the Sixteen were soon executed or arrested.
Brisson's dictionary, derived from similar works that preceded it, was a standard legal dictionary of the time, and lexicographers used and borrowed from his work as an authoritative source for hundreds of years. It included much more than mere definitions: at the beginning of the work there is a useful list of the laws of the kingdom and collected Roman law of antiquity, and Brisson also included new sections on rites and laws of marriage, adultery, and feudalism. Included as an appendix is Francois Hotmam's commentary on the terminology of feudal law.
The 1743 edition (the last one published) is a great deal larger than the others, edited and corrected by Johann Gottlieb Heineccius, a fine German jurist and scholar at Halle. It not only includes more notes and entries, it also adds a section on interpreting Latin grammar.
For more on Brisson and France in the 16th century, see Elie Barnavi & Robert Descimon, Le Sainte Ligue, le Juge, et la Potence: l'Assassinat du Président Brisson (Paris: Hachette, 1985), or J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (New York: St. Martin's, 1975).
Editions: Frankfurt: 1578, 1587, 1683; Leipzig:
1721; Halle: 1743.
Bibliography
If you have questions or suggestions about this page, please contact .